Here’s Pierce County’s $50M plan to house 200-300 of its chronically homeless residents

Pierce County leaders are looking at a development outside Austin, Texas as a model for addressing chronic homelessness.

The community has microhomes arranged into neighborhoods, with a health clinic, addiction and mental health services, and job opportunities on site.

It’s not temporary housing. They’re permanent homes for those who want to stay.

Residents pay rent, build relationships and are part of a kind of homeowners association.

Pierce County plans to build a similar development for about 200-300 residents on 20 acres.

County Executive Bruce Dammeier included funding for the project in the biennial budget last year, and in the end the County Council approved $22 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding for it, with conditions.

That’s about half of what the development is expected to cost. The plan is to raise the rest of the roughly $50 million from philanthropic funds and other government sources.

County officials think it eventually will take about $3 million a year to run the community.

The Tacoma Rescue Mission has expressed interest in doing that, and recently submitted a feasibility study that the County Council discussed at a study session July 11.

A full proposal for the development, including a location for it, will go before the council in October.

What’s happening in Texas?

Steve O’Ban, senior counsel in the Pierce County Executive’s Office and a former state senator (R-University Place), said, as the county was researching different approaches to homelessness, he came across an article about the Community First! Village near Austin.

Other models, such as apartment-style housing, only had about 36 percent of residents who were still housed after five years, O’Ban said. The retention rate of residents in the Community First! Village, which opened in 2015, was about 88 percent.

Thomas Aitchison is the communications director for Mobile Loaves and Fishes, the nonprofit behind the village.

“Mobile Loaves & Fishes believes that the single greatest cause of homelessness is a profound, catastrophic loss of family,” Aitchison said via email. “Based on this foundational belief, the work of replicating a community similar to Community First! Village must focus on rebuilding and re-weaving the relational care, belonging, and support that has been lost by those experiencing homelessness.”

Organizations in Florida, Oklahoma and several places in Texas that learned about the model now have their own developments, Aitchison said.

O’Ban had made presentations to city councils in Pierce County about the development, hoping to get local officials on board.

“The county was blessed with a good deal of federal funding, and we want to do something big,” O’Ban told the Puyallup City Council at a study session June 14. “Something that would really move the dial, in several different areas, but certainly in this area of homelessness.”

The county estimates it has about 1,600 chronically homeless residents.

“These are people who have three or more episodes of homelessness lasting a year or longer,” Pierce County Community Services manager John Barbee said at the meeting. “And a lot of those people have mental health issues, behavioral health issues, substance abuse issues, and just challenges with employability, and oftentimes have a disability.”

The Community First! Village has 310 residents and is growing. The organization has raised funds for 2,000 homes on 160 acres, O’Ban said.

“How do we break that vicious cycle of shelter, back on the streets, our emergency room facilities, lots of first responder contacts, and often in and out of jails?” O’Ban asked the Puyallup council. “This is a model, which I submit to this body, that answers that question in a remarkably successful way.”

O’Ban argues that the neighborhood layout of the microhomes fosters relationships, where other models have apartment-style layouts that isolate residents.

Staff and live-in volunteers are on site at the Community First! Village. There’s an auto shop, blacksmithing shop, pottery studio, organic farming and other places where residents can work. At Pierce County’s microhome community (which has yet to be named), O’Ban said, he expects agriculture would be a focus.

He’s visited the community near Austin four times, he said, and has brought County Executive Dammeier and other local leaders to see how it operates.

“It attracts a lot of private funding,” he told the Puyallup council.

What’s the plan in Pierce County?

The Pierce County Council will get a full proposal identifying the property, cost and how the development will operate by October.

If it’s approved, the permitting process would start with construction expected to get underway in 2024, O’Ban said.

“We have two or three very promising pieces of property of 20 acres or more,” O’Ban told the Puyallup council. “None of them are in Puyallup, I might add, but we’re looking at unincorporated Pierce County for this.”

Asked by council member Dennis King about public safety, O’Ban said the community in Austin has a good relationship with local law enforcement.

“We’ll need to have a very compelling answer to the surrounding area where this village is going to be,” O’Ban said. “They deserve that, and we’ll have a plan on the security side.”

Puyallup council member Julie Door asked if the village would isolate residents.

“Are we disconnecting them from society?” Door wanted to know.

The set-up of the community means you interact with your neighbors, O’Ban said. He also said the community would need to have access to Pierce Transit and probably a shuttle to get residents to appointments or to connect with friends and family.

Behavioral health services, vocational services and other resources would be available on site, he said.

Puyallup council member John Palmer asked O’Ban how the Community First! Village handles addiction.

O’Ban said there are recovery services and that they’re “constantly engaging residents into appropriate types of therapy,” and that they don’t allow illegal behavior.

O’Ban said he thinks the Pierce County site probably would require residents to be “engaged in recovery” — which isn’t necessarily the case in Austin — but that it’s still being discussed.

Asked what changes Pierce County might need to make for the model to work here, compared to Austin, O’Ban told The News Tribune: “We might need to regulate a little more kind of who comes on the premises.” Anyone can drive onto or walk onto the Austin campus, he said.

“It’s like any other neighborhood,” he said.

That might be monitored a little differently on the Pierce County campus, O’Ban said.

The Pierce County campus also probably would be a bit more compact in its layout, he said, due to the value of land here.

Where some units in Austin require residents to access separate communal restrooms, the Pierce County homes would each have their own. The weather here makes that a necessity, he said.

NPR reported earlier this year about the spread of tiny homes across the country as a solution to homelessness.

Tiny homes are a good emergency option, Donald Whitehead Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, told NPR.

Long-term solutions, Whitehead said, include more living-wage jobs and funding for housing vouchers, among other things.

“There’s been this theme since the ‘70s that there are some people in society that are less deserving,” Whitehead told NPR. “And the tiny home kind of fits within that mindset.”

As for tiny homes in remote areas, housing researcher Luis Quintero at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School told NPR: “There’s a balance between the benefits you get from the improved structure and the bad factors you could get from being in a worse location.”

Where will the money come from?

The Rescue Mission’s feasibility study says it believes “the range of costs to acquire, design, develop and construct 200 living units and supporting buildings is $40M-$55M.”

As for what it would cost to run a 200-unit community, the study estimated $2.5 million to $3 million a year.

That’s about 30 percent of the Rescue Mission’s operating budget. Like the Rescue Mission’s current funding, 65 percent would come from private funding and 35 percent would come from government funding, the study said.

“Because operations of a CFV will not likely begin until late 2024, and staffing and other operating costs will gradually ramp up as more residents move in, TRM is confident it can raise the estimated annual operating costs of a fully operational village, or $2.5-$3M, over the next three years,” the report said.

Duke Paulson, executive director of the Tacoma Rescue Mission, told the Pierce County Council July 11 that the Pierce County Housing Authority has initially agreed to provide 50 housing vouchers for the project, which would bring in about $600,000 per year in rent.

Pierce County Council Chair Derek Young asked at the study session whether the model is evidence-based.

O’Ban said it’s not, as far he’s aware.

It’s a new model, he said, and has been successful.

Young suggested partnering with a local university or maybe a federal agency that would be willing to study the success of the approach when it launches in Pierce County.

“So that we can prove to the public that it’s working,” Young said. “... If we’re confident in this and it’s not that well-tested so far, maybe we should be thinking about that testing along the way.”

Myron Bernard, senior director of community engagement at the Rescue Mission, said that many logistics still need to be determined, and that the nonprofit is excited about the project.

“We recognize that people who are experiencing homelessness ... they’re worth being shown dignity, and we believe this model shows them dignity,” Bernard told The News Tribune. “And we also believe that it’s going to have a positive impact on our county and city as a whole, and that’s our heart is that we want to take care of people who are hurting, but we also realize this affects our whole community, and we want to begin to provide some hope for all of us.”